Pearl Place developers nix hotel component

BOULDER – The developers of Pearl Place in Boulder have submitted to the city a second concept plan for the site that does away with a 120-room hotel and replaces it with a third office building.

New plans for the project near the intersection of 30th and Pearl streets call for three four-story office buildings totaling about 300,000 square feet of space, and also do away with a 400-seat amphitheater that had been proposed in the original concept plan.

Denver developers Darren Fisk and Dan Otis led the purchase of four parcels of land last year for $12.2 million. The four parcels total 4.33 acres and wrap around the Chase Bank at the southwest corner of 30th and Pearl.

Neither Otis nor Fisk could be reached Wednesday.

The developers will go before the city’s planning board Feb. 27 for a second concept review to gain feedback from the planning board and community members. The group originally went through a concept review last fall. At that time, planning board members had made several comments on the original proposal and asked the developers to come back for a second concept review.

Boulder planner Elaine McLaughlin said a second concept review isn’t required and that the developers could have gone ahead with submitting a more formal site review application with their changes.

“Not everybody would do that,” McLaughlin said. “It’s expensive. It’s another trip to planning board and another process. But you can get some really great feedback in the concept plan review, so I think they decided to go through it again.”

Planning board members last fall had told developers that they’d like to see the hotel along Pearl Street be more “building forward” and not set back so far from the street. Board members also commented that a proposed street bisecting the development wasn’t necessary.

The new plan does away with the street, and the office building that replaces the hotel is closer to Pearl Street than the hotel had been. The amphitheater, meanwhile, is replaced in the new concept plan with a more natural open space area on the east side of the property. The previous plan also called for about 6,000 square feet of retail space that has been removed from the new plan. All of the proposed 770 parking spaces are underground.

Pearl Place sits in the heart of one of Boulder’s most active areas for redevelopment. To the east across 30th Street, the Solana 3100 Pearl apartments are being built. To the north of those is the Depot Square development that will include a Hyatt hotel, bus rapid-transit station and affordable housing.

To the south of Pearl Place, the 29 North apartments and Twenty Ninth Street mall were also built in recent years.